British royals don’t have to go to costume stores for something to wear to a Halloween party. They can borrow movie-famous outfits from actors just like Prince Harry did in 2016 when he celebrated Halloween with Meghan Markle. The Duke of Sussex borrowed a costume from his friend, actor Tom Hardy, and took it with him to Canada for a memorable night out with the Duchess of Sussex.
Harry borrowed Tom Hardy’s ‘Max Max costume for a 2016 Halloween party
On the last night before he and Meghan’s relationship went public (a British tabloid broke the news of their romance on Nov. 1, 2016.), the pair went to a Halloween party at Soho House’s Toronto, Ontario, location.
There with them were Harry’s cousin, Princess Eugenie, who’d known Meghan before she and Harry started dating, and her now-husband, Jack Brooksbank. The theme? “Apocalypse,” Harry recalled in his 2023 Spare memoir.
Although he’d “not had great luck with themed fancy-dress parties” in the past, the now-40-year-old royal decided to “give it another go” and turned to Hardy for help. He called the actor and asked to borrow his Mad Max outfit, which Hardy had worn a year earlier as the titular character in Mad Max: Fury Road.
“The whole thing?” Harry recalled Hardy asking him to which he replied, “Yes, please, mate! The whole kit,” noting the actor had “given it all to me before I left Britain.”
Tom Hardy and Prince Harry | David M. Benett/Getty Images for Audi
Harry loved being ‘unrecognizable’ in Hardy’s ‘Mad Max’ costume
Later, when trying on the costume in “Meg’s little bathroom” at her Toronto home where she lived while filming the USA legal drama Suits, Harry remembered how his now-wife “roared with laughter” upon seeing him in the outfit.
Calling it “funny and a little scary,” the Halloween costume did what it needed to do—disguise Harry’s identity. “The main thing was: I was unrecognizable,” he said. People recognized Meghan, who wore “torn black shorts, a camo top, fishnet stockings,” to the party “but no one looked twice at her dystopian date.”
Harry liked it so much he didn’t want to take it off. “I wished I could wear this disguise every day,” he said. “I wished I could reuse it the next day and visit her on the set of ‘Suits.’”
Harry and Meghan now celebrate Halloween with their children
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle | Eric Charbonneau/Archewell Foundation via Getty Images
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex spend Halloween a little—OK, a lot—differently these days. As parents of two, they’re known to go trick-or-treating with their son, Prince Archie, 5, and daughter, Princess Lilibet, 3.
The pair were spotted trick-or-treating with Archie and Lili near their home in Montecito, California, on Halloween night in 2023. Meghan also revealed during a 2021 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that the kids dressed up as a dinosaur (Archie) and Flower, the skunk from Bambi (Lili) for Halloween that year.
However, don’t put it past Harry and Meghan to occasionally get dressed up in costumes themselves. After all, they did wear penguin onesies to a small engagement party before announcing the news publicly in November 2017.
